In praise of Kernus 3.0

Ramiro Espinoza
Posts: 839
I've been doing some test using URW's Kernus 3.0 and... call me whatever you want but I've found that it generates surprisingly good spacing. It's not perfect and there are always some few letters that I would space in a different way, but IMHO you can save time if in the first stages of development you use Kernus and just correct its output when necessary.
It's a pity that there is not an OS X version.
At the moment I am not using it to generate kerning because I rely more on MetricsMachine (and I like it that way).
It's a pity that there is not an OS X version.
At the moment I am not using it to generate kerning because I rely more on MetricsMachine (and I like it that way).

1
Comments
-
Ramiro Espinoza said:It's a pity that there is not an OS X version.
0 -
AFAIK, Kernagic is a different software.0
-
Yes, Kernagic and Kernus 3.0 differ a lot (although I supplied the table-based algorithm* for the first and I recently gave the Kernus installer from April 1998 to Ramiro). I described the differences between Kernagic and Kernus 3.0 a bit in this topic. Kernagic uses the stem interval as starting point for the table-based spacing and Kernus calculates the white space based on some key characters like the lowercase n.
Back in 1997–98 I was beta tester of this version of Kernus, which was the only one that went beyond kerning. It was developed for Mac OS 9 exclusively. I still provide my students who manage to get SheepShaver running with copies. We (URW++/DTL) actually never ported the stuff to FontMaster, but we’re considering to incorporate this auto-spacing (and the kerning generation) in GlyphMaster (like OTM available for OS X, Windows, and Linux).
* see also the LS Cadencer
1 -
@LeMo aka Frank E Blokland Ardi Executor went open-source some years ago, and I had good experience with it when it was still closed source. I think it emulate 68k mac though (os 8?).0
Categories
- All Categories
- 46 Introductions
- 3.8K Typeface Design
- 475 Type Design Critiques
- 555 Type Design Software
- 1.1K Type Design Technique & Theory
- 638 Type Business
- 829 Font Technology
- 29 Punchcutting
- 506 Typography
- 120 Type Education
- 312 Type History
- 74 Type Resources
- 109 Lettering and Calligraphy
- 30 Lettering Critiques
- 79 Lettering Technique & Theory
- 528 Announcements
- 84 Events
- 110 Job Postings
- 164 Type Releases
- 169 Miscellaneous News
- 274 About TypeDrawers
- 54 TypeDrawers Announcements
- 118 Suggestions and Bug Reports